mleku on Nostr: there is specialist rug cleaning places all over the balkans too, with all these ...

there is specialist rug cleaning places all over the balkans too, with all these lines they hang them on after they pressure clean them, i've seen them in sofia, sarajevo, novi sad, varna and belgrade

and yeah, the steam... i know that in Sofia a huge amount of the city is heated via waste steam from the power plants, in the middle of winter at my place in Lozenets in Sofia i remember noticing the steam drifting up from the drains, and in the centre of town you would see that the manhole covers were all snow-free and often steam wafting out

when i was in Bucharest i remember out near the university there is a power plant with i think two cooling towers, and due to the steam it is constantly a light patter of precipitation of water, and it made me realise "oh yeah, they use this for running hot water systems and central heating systems in Sofia" - and how much energy was being lost to this cooling tower, compared to in Sofia where literally half the city the residential towers are heated and hot water is provided from this waste heat energy

never seen anything like it in the West anywhere, which is insane... i know that there's a lot of bad things about the former communist countries, and even still many of them have huge problems with really overt corruption, but those commieblocks and the waste heat steam systems is not one of the bad things, it's extremely clever and efficient, in fact

i knew there was something weird about the radiators in the apartment i had in Sofia first place i lived there... i could see the inlet was above the outlet, the opposite of a liquid recirculation system, and they were dead silent, not like the pump driven noisy things i saw in Novi Sad, meaning they were steam radiators (and it should be noted that Bulgaria is a major coal producer, they have so much coal there they sell it and the power generated to their neighbours, serbia and romania and macedonia, maybe even greece)